Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Loren Javier.
So, I completely lost it towards the end of Toy Story 3, and my only real consolation was that the person I was with cried at the same parts that I did. I honestly hadn't expected this development, in part because the movie managed to keep the ending ambiguous until the final scene, but I thought the smartest part of the movie, perhaps of the series, was the moment when Andy gives all of his most beloved toys, including Woody, to a little girl his family knows.
It's an extremely brave story moment. The entire movie is built up around an idea Woody promulgates to the other toys: that their role is not to be played with, but to be there if Andy ever needs them again. But in the end, Woody decides that his friends deserve to be with a child who has an imagination and love to match their first owner, and decides that the best service he can give Andy is to provide himself to be handed off, to be the bridge between the child Andy was and the man he'll become. The moment Andy chooses to let Woody go, but to introduce him and the other toys to Bonnie by playing with them one last time and helping her integrate them into her own fantasy universe, left me in floods. I'm tearing up again just thinking of it.
Without going into too much detail, part of the reason the end just destroyed me is because it's true. My favorite childhood toy, the one I'm going to give to my first kid someday, was the gift of a family friend who had outgrown it. It's rare that I go to the movies and have a "I thought I was the only one" moment in the theater. In fact, it may never have happened to me in my entire life. But Pixar got me—and the feeling of seeing one of my deepest, oldest memories extracted and played out by someone else on screen just devastated me. It's an amazing testament to how considerate, how talented, how emotionally astute the story-writing team at Pixar is, and the vast, wasted potential left lying around by other studios.